Early cross-dress rioters unveiled

Jan 1 2008 by Darren Devine, Western Mail

A NEW book has revealed how the “Rebecca riots” may have come to Ceredigion a full 20 years before they arrived in rural South Wales.

Using tactics similar to those deployed 20 years later in the Rebecca riots – when disgruntled Welshmen famously disguised themselves in women’s clothing – Eirian Jones’s book The War of the Little Englishman tells how locals in Llanrhystud, Ceredigion, drove out a Lincolnshire-born aristocrat.

The book details how Augustus Brackenbury spent half his inheritance buying crown land in Mynydd Bach, Ceredigion, to set up a country estate in the 1820s. But the plans involved enclosing common land, from which generations of locals had eked out a living. Between 20 and 30 armed local men, many of them dressed in women’s clothes, rounded on Brackenbury and his house was razed to the ground.

Brackenbury was held by the locals and half-roasted over a fire, according to the book. He eventually abandoned all hope of avenging his mistreatment and within 10 years sold up and returned to England.

Between 1839 and 1844 there were violent attacks from the poor of South Wales on tollgates. The attackers wore women’s clothes and claimed the identity of “Rebecca and her daughters”.